“We claim that all wealth comes, either directly or indirectly, _from_ the earth, or _out_ of it by the application of labor, and that only which is produced by labor is wealth, and belongs exclusively to the producer. To illustrate, the material composing our body was once inorganic matter. The plant organized it. We eat, digest and assimilate the plant out of which our tissues are built. The crude material out of which our clothes are made is produced by the earth. The cotton plant that grows on the earth produced the cotton. The sheep, on whose back the wool grows, lives on the grass, etc., which is produced by the earth. Our books, houses, shoes, hats, and our physical organs, which perform their wonderfully complex functions, all come, either directly or indirectly, out of the earth, air and ocean in a crude form. Then they are shaped by the hand of labor into the proper form and become wealth. “By labor we manufacture clothes, write books, raise, gather and lay up food, build houses, construct railroads, improve land, acquire and maintain a sound body and a healthy, cultivated mind. The storehouse of thought, kindness, love and freedom is also filled by labor and exertion. All these mental acquisitions are therefore constituent parts of genuine wealth--wealth of the most precious kind, for material wealth is easily acquired when we are rich in faultless organized-self and in mental wealth. “The air we breathe is not wealth, because it is not produced by labor. The wild apple and plum on the tree are not wealth, because no human labor has been expended in the production of them. But the picked apple of the same tree, in the hand of the consumer, or in his cellar is wealth; he picked or stored it away for future use, which required labor. Sunshine and rain, native grass and water in its native bed or channel, are not wealth. Land in its natural state is not wealth, because it was not produced by labor. There was land before there was human labor. But all improvement made on land by labor is wealth and belongs exclusively to the person who made the improvement. “All wealth, then, organized-self, material and mental, comes ultimately out of the inorganic earth (air and water), and requires labor and effort to produce them, and is wealth only so far as they required labor in their production.” “Have the inhabitants of Mars always been as wealthy as they now are?” asked Mrs. Uwins.